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AT&T To Introduce Broadband Caps
rekenner writes "In the upcoming weeks, AT&T customers are going to start receiving notices that their broadband services are going to have a monthly cap, starting in May. DSL users will have a cap of 150 GB per month, while U-Verse users will have a more 'generous' cap of 250 GB per month. However, unlike other caps, it won't be until your third month of overage, on the life of the account, that you'll be charged an overage. Thanks, I guess."
What's the average Netflix data rate? That couldn't have anything to do with this now could it ...
150? 250? You guys are getting off easy. They just added a cap up in Canada for Bell DSL at 20gb a month. Then expect you to pay like30-50 bucks for it.
I noticed yesterday that I had been downloading about 3 GiB yesterday. I was mostly just listening to last.fm through rhythmbox. So if I used that much every day (on average), I would use about 30*3=90 GiB a month. That's a tad too close to the cap, I think.
How exactly is it false advertising to tell users exactly how much bandwidth they can use and then allow them to use that amount of bandwidth? It was false advertising when the advertising said unlimited when it really wasn't. Now they're calling it limited and giving you what they say they will. Just because you want something different doesn't make what they're doing wrong.
It's not the magnitude of the cap. It's that bandwidth - which is a momentary capacity, not a "month cycle" capacity - is being charged that way.
This ain't electricity or water, where there is a certain central pool quantity to draw from. It's on or off.
Add to this the fact that NONE of these dishonest fuckers in these companies give you a good way to track "usage", and it gets worse.
Add in the fact that they are all doing this not to "manage slowdowns" but instead to try to push people back into buying "on demand TV" and "premium cable TV packages with rental DVR" and it's clear: this is not what they say it is. This is pure greed on their part.
I just don't understand why americans tolerate ISPs enforcing ridiculous caps. From a swedish perspective it seems kind of backwards, I don't really know of any ISPs here that have caps and it really seems like a concept take from the early days of consumer broadband (mid-to-late 90s there were a few swedish ISPs that tried the whole thing with caps but they were pretty much forced into obscurity since most ISPs didn't cap).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
False dichotomy.
There is a third answer: The people who supply the pipes keep up with the current state of the art. They are not doing so. They are not reinvesting in their infrastructure and the result is lesser quality and rationing.
Frankly, what the telecoms charge for overages on caps is highway robbery. It has been demonstrated that it's simply cheaper to send a SSD via snail mail and *destroy the drive* after than it is to go over the ridiculous caps that are appearing in Canada. And we're starting to see this in the US as TFA indicates.
We here in the US threw tons of money at the broadband providers during the Clinton administration and all they did was give it out to their shareholders. They continue to refuse to reinvest, and prefer to kill the goose for short term gain. We are falling behind Europe and Asia in terms of broadband, and will soon be a backwater similar to Africa if the telecoms get their way.
This is what you get when you utterly refuse to regulate once the telecoms become regional monopolies or duopolies. There is no more competition, so the raping of the customer goes on.
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BM
Here's the thing, ATT will be capping the bandwidth of "Internet" usage. This is separate from the usage of the streaming HDTV signal that ATT provides to U-verse customers. One could run the TV streaming 24x7 and record 4 shows at once and run many times the bandwidth cap and there's no cap or additional fees. The issue lies in what you do with your computers. They are basically coming out and admitting that it's not a bandwidth issue, it's a services issues. ATT wants to own parts of what you do such as cloud gaming services and video streaming services. When you use their services they can be exempted from the caps, thus crushing competition like Netflix or Hulu. This isn't about bandwidth or caps or infrastructure, It's about greed and it's about net neutrality. Does anyone find it coincidental that this comes the week after the FCC net neutrality rules got struck down?
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
According to TFA, U-Verse TV will not count towards the bandwidth cap. This strikes me as a wee bit anti-competitive.
Sorry buddy, but you're full of shit. AT&T actually removed the word "unlimited" from their broadband advertising months ago. Remains to be seen whether these new caps will be explicitly referenced in new advertising (I highly doubt they will be) but honestly I see no problem with doing so. You're not required to include every detail of your service in an advertisement, you just can't include false details. If a consumer makes bad assumptions and doesn't bother to learn what they're actually signing up for, that's their problem.
Not really. All they have to do is say the cap applies to data sources external to the AT&T network, since they have to pay transit costs.
All AT&T sourced data -- servers directly on their network, such as their IPTV servers -- don't apply to the cap since it is all internal.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What's this got to do with Net Neutrality? It's throttling back traffic and charging for overage - it's a Business Model - not entirely unlike how they charge for Long Distance.
It's Net Neutrality because they are not throttling or capping their own competing services, while they are capping Netflix. AT&T has just announced that they, like Comcast, are the gatekeepers of the Internet, and have free reign to control how much you say, who you say it to, and where your information comes from.
So then how, as a YouTube user, do I get original videos that my team has produced and uploaded into "on demand TV" and "premium cable TV packages with rental DVR"?
Silly consumer - You don't.
We all need to learn to ignore that whole YouTube fad thing and come to terms with the fact that only big Hollywood money can make "real" content. Just sit back, relax, have a can of government-permitted intoxicant, and watch whatever your push-content provider has decided to make available to you.
AT&T U-Verse traffic is not included in the cap.
AT&T not counting their U-Verse video traffic is effectively the same as Comcast not counting their video bandwidth too. It doesn't matter if the service provider delivers their own video content via IP multicast (U-Verse), RF (Comcast) or discs strapped to trained pigeons.
Any download cap by any ISP who also provides video service is anti-competitive.
Putting moderation advice in your
Depends on how many can and do vote with their feet. If a lot of AT&T people leave, AT&T might rethink the policy. Likewise if a cable ISP or whoever else is getting a lot of people from AT&T because of the cap, they might think long and hard before putting in such a cap themselves.
If - And I mean that as a really big "if" - You have the great fortune of having more than a single broadband ISP in your area, you might choose to switch between them when one misbehaves. When both demonstrate the same contempt for their customers, what then? Go back to dialup, crippling yourself just to teach 'em a lesson?
Market pressure only works when you actually have something resembling an open marketplace. When only two long-entrenched players offer what you need, they just take turns seeing who can screw you harder.